Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd. 

         What did scar me was the treble isolation of being an only child of parents who were distant from me and from each other; being myself, whoever that was, amid my peers, who all seemed to have firm identities; and being a stranger in a strange land. It could have been the recipe for another Hitler, and it certainly explains in part my lifelong interest in bizarre loners, including the Führer, whom I see as a kind of crazy country cousin,...

Church Going

by Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, and stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, t...

 Shoplifting at Dracula's: a memoir, cont'd.

In our Ford Squire, Dad at the wheel (Mum never drove when he was available, regardless whether he was drunk or sober—although she was never drunk), we returned to the Continent, Dover to Calais across the choppy Channel under November skies the color of slate and, bidding Paris au revoir from the périphérique, traveled down the poplar-lined Roman highway, Route Nationale 5, through the dirty golds and muddy midwinter spinach-greens of Burg...

I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a better job. But in the meantime, nobody knows as much about my books as I do. Nobody has the right but me to say which words go into my books or get deleted or edited. When I'm dying, I'll smile, knowing I stood up for my books. If I die with more money, that wouldn't bring a smile to my face. Unless I got better drugs or more delicious-looking nurses.

William T. Vollmann

The truth is that we mediocre men cannot even imagine what it is to be a great man like Mozart and Shakespeare and thus to be free from the domination of the contemporary prejudices, beliefs, morals, artistic rules, scruples (call them what you will) with which even the most enlightened of us are—often unconsciously—obsessed.

              W.J. Turner, Mozart: The Man and His Works

Paris was a place of wonder. It was a real city, my first. I loved it, even peopled as it was by foreigners who insisted on speaking a foreign language and expecting me to understand—me, transatlantic princeling that I was! I had no intention of learning their jabber, yet later did, to a near-native pitch of fluency. My parents, however, remained staunchly hopeless at languages. E...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd. (Photo is of the RMS Queen Elizabeth.)

Of the transatlantic journey that links me to that bygone era of great ocean voyages that is in turn linked to all of previous seaborne human history, I recall only teasing episodes: the bustle and excitement of boarding the Queen Elizabeth; the dark water slopping ominously, far beneath the steep gangway; the brilliance of the light at sea; the briny ocean-smell; the miniature salt and pepper shakers on the dining ta...

Blair was, of course, better known by his pen name, George Orwell. He was one of the most indispensable twentieth-century writers. Only Koestler understood the dangers of totalitarian ideology as well. But Orwell was a cha...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd. (Photo: Flagler St., Miami, 1951. Note the coincidence of McRory's Department Store, at right.)

         I was born into a tropical never-never-land of pink stucco and Jewish retirees and towering palms, on July 20th, 1951, at around two in the afternoon, seven years to the day after Colonel von Stauffenberg failed to extinguish the Führer via bomb, and precisely eighteen years before another colonel, Neil Armstrong, made his contribution to histor...

Quite frankly, I've always thought, in my infinite naivety, that proclaiming oneself "anti-Zionist" or "anti-Israeli" rather than "anti-Semitic" gives one a hell of a license to go ahead and be, well, anti-Semitic. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Arab world, where "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and Mein Kampf are perennial bestsellers, and nowhere in the Arab world more than in Hamas-controlled Gaza. But it seems that the Fatah-controlled Palestine Authority (a hopeless sho...

We don’t remember days. We remember moments.

                                             Cesare Pavese

     Two years ago, when I was trying to sell property in France, the French authorities, in their inscrutable Chinese way (not for nothing is the French ruling elite called Les Mandarins), instructed me to furnish them with the address of my parents’ first conjug...

Here we finish Chapter One of my memoir–which is currently titled Shoplifting at Dracula's, by the way, for reasons that will become apparent if you stick around. (Photo: Rural Co. Tyrone.)

4. My mother’s bunch were Irish too, but they were (or became) Prods, “Scotch-Irish” in the parlance of then, an entirely inaccurate label because they were God-mad Erse through and through, those Catholic McRorys from the county Tyrone. The Catholic McRorys from Tyrone remade themselves into th...

On the heels of the terrible earthquake in Haiti, in which as many as 500,000 people may have died, I think back to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and Voltaire's reaction to it. I almost always find the Sage of Ferney a fresh breeze in the ambient fug, and in this case, as in so many others, he took on the obscurantists with gusto, and from his outrage came a poem, Poème Sur le Désastre de Lisbonne, and ultimately, of course, Candide, in which the character of Dr. Pangloss is based on the the...

And on we go, down all the days of Boylans and others; we're in about 1888 now. The photo shows an original DuPont powder mill on the Brandywine River, Wilmington, Del., ca. 1905.

3. Widowed Mary Boylan was left to bring up Ned Junior and Bob as best she could, which she did by moving from the slums of South Philly twenty-odd miles SSW to more salubrious surroundings in less grand but smaller and cheaper Wilmington, Delaware. There, in the city of the DuPonts, she determinedly pursued succ...

...and on and on. Here's the next bit. I'll go on like this until I've serialized the whole thing, à la Dickens. Maybe some kind editor will spot it and ask to publish it. (All right, all right, you can stop laughing now.) Intermittently, I'll be posting pieces on other subjects than myself, which will be a pleasant change.         

2.  In the 1870s a mysterious crisis that led directly to my being born an American occurred in the Boylan house of hogs in Clones. Whether the casu...

Memories of another car, another era (I have my car-guy hat firmly on today): This boat-like conveyance, the Hudson Commodore of 1949-50, quite upscale for the time, boasted Hudson's then-famous straight-six engine, the finest, creamiest powerplant from the finest American car manufacturer of the day after Lincoln and Studebaker. An off-white Commodore convertible similar to the one in the picture, with red leather interior, three on the tree, and all-tube in-dash radio, belonged to my mot...

Unfortunately, life made Gilbert Sorrentino an expert on the letdowns, rejections, and deceptions inherent in the writing life; fortunately, he turned his disappointments into satire, as a satirist does. Here are some excerpts from "Sea of Rains," a chapter in his very funny parody of the arty and literary worlds, Lunar Follies (Coffee House Press, 2005), in which imaginary but all-too-real rejection letters pour from various publishers onto the desk of the agent of a writer known only as "...